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I live and blog in Ann Arbor, Michigan. University of Michigan BA and MA from Eastern Michigan University. One term in the Michigan Army National Guard. The Institute of Land Warfare, Army magazine, Military Review, and Joint Force Quarterly have published my occasional articles.

The Undead Archives

My undead archives pre-Blogger were actually restored to life after Geocities sites went dark. Start at the old home page here.
If you find a link to the old site on the current site or old site, you should be able to replace the "g" in "geocities" with an "r" and make a good link.
I hope to move all the older archives here (and started that project) but it is really tedious.

Monday, January 26, 2015

Bringing Down the Knights

As much as we produce excellent weapons, our real strength is the quality of the troops who use them. Is technology going to make our forces suffer the same fate as highly trained knights when they faced peasants with firearms?

Precision weapons are making the old expression, "if you can see it you can hit it" more intense by making it easier to see it and cheaper and easier to hit it. This is a dangerous trend for our forces.

An Austin-based company, TrackingPoint, has developed a high-powered, long-range computerized rifle that can turn anyone into an expert marksman. But some wonder whether putting that technology in the hands of everyday people is a wise idea.

The weapon calculates the ideal aim point and doesn't let you pull the trigger until you are pointing the rifle at the proper aim point.

Knights relied on years of training and constant practice to make themselves deadly against any peasant who picked up a blade and tried to defend himself.

But with a firearm and mere hours of practice, a peasant could strike down a knight. That's why Japan banned firearms way back when.

That's unlikely to happen now, so is our training advantage at risk?

Looking beyond that, how long before the weapon can aim itself?And be part of a persistent surveillance network (of drones and mast-mounted cameras and sensors) over a battlefield?

Mind you, shooting is just one skill that a well-trained soldier must have. A trigger puller whose only advantage is he can shoot with this weapon will still panic and run in adversity.

Or just sicken and die in the field from lack of sanitation discipline.

So this weapon isn't a silver bullet solution to mass producing skilled soldiers. But it is a potentially disruptive trend.

Today's submarines are in danger of becoming increasingly vulnerable as “game changers” in undersea warfare make it easier to detect them, a new report says.

Does this mean we are getting closer to the point when every shooter can see (and kill) every target on the battlefield (which could be increasingly large?)

If so, we may face Lanchester's Square Law in the real world, where all things being equal, a larger force will prevail over a smaller force because the smaller force will die at a faster rate than the larger force every time.

So our focus on quality and training may succumb to a wave of cheaper forces who can kill as well as we can.

Our tech advantage was all fun and games as long as we had the near monopoly added to our training. But when our advantage is narrow or gone, what will we do?

Again, this trend won't eliminate the advantage of training since the full logic of Lanchester's Square requires each side to stand in place and shoot until all are dead.

In the real world, the less-well trained force will break first and their rate of fire will decline and plummet.

Yet our casualties will be higher if we face an enemy with such weapons while we do not have them. In the short run, the enemy will kill more of our troops until their shakier training leads them to falter and break.

Although how this applies to an enemy of fanatics willing to die in place is another matter altogether. That type of enemy will fight until they are all dead or nearly so--at least at the tactical level. In the bigger picture, fanatics can break, too.

Our training advantage over poorer quality fighters will be reduced in the short run in a battle at least, even if we also have the self-aiming rifles. And if we face an army of equal quality, quantity will matter.

We don't like to spend manpower in this manner. So making those smart rifles--and other platforms--fire on their own (killer robots!) will be the only way for us to provide the quantity to be the side of the equation that doesn't fall to zero.

(I could have sworn I had a blog post on this concept. Quite old, I thought, but still around. But I can't find it. So I may be mistaken. I may just be thinking of an article I've had lying around for a while that I've worked on.)

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Note on site statistics: When I strip out the junk hits from Blogger statistics that seem to come and go in waves, I appear to have about 10,000 hits per month.

My old statistics package, Site Meter, seems to miss a lot and even disappears visits after they've appeared.

I just added a new StatCounter. So far it shows far fewer hits than Blogger and is more in line with Site Meter. But I suspect neither of the non-Blogger statistics register hits from social media. So I'm not sure what my audience size is. It is puzzling to me.